Why do I dance? I never really asked myself that question. My initial love for dance was visceral and complete; when I started as a teenager, my brain and body had found an activity that could consume my thoughts and my schedule, and I accepted that with joy. At 17, when I moved to New York City to pursue a career in dance, it became my professional identity and my purpose.<\/p>\n
But the pandemic put so many roadblocks on that life. Locked down in my apartment, I couldn\u2019t tap dance (too loud), and I couldn\u2019t swing dance (no partner). There were no social dances to attend, no in-person classes to teach or take, and there certainly were no gigs that obligated me to \u201cbe\u201d a dancer. There were very few occasions where I even felt like dancing, and so, for the first time, I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
I did other things: I played piano. I biked around New York City. I read 30 books that had sat in my home for years. I was surprised to feel satisfied by these dance-less days. Without dance, I still felt like me.<\/p>\n
But when the world \u201creopened,\u201d I returned to my usual routine of performances, dance festivals and work meetings. I was ready to do something, and work (miraculously) came back. I was eager to reconnect with my chosen family of artistic collaborators, and I was excited to become, again, a dancer.<\/p>\n \u201cDance is the lens through which I experience everything else.\u201d But something has changed. I feel different\u2014I don\u2019t feel like the dance-obsessed pre-pandemic version of myself. My new self loves dance, but my new self also loves biking, reading and playing piano.<\/p>\n My first ballet teacher said to me, \u201cDance is a sickness of sorts. It\u2019s not something you choose to do; it\u2019s something you must do.\u201d I used to agree. But now, it feels like something I choose to do, and I like that.<\/p>\n The decision to dance has been, and continues to be, so good for me. I\u2019m glad I have dance; it\u2019s the constant. It\u2019s the lens through which I experience everything else. It\u2019s simply the most interesting thing I\u2019ve ever chosen to do. <\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The post Caleb Teicher on Choosing Dance After the Pandemic<\/a> appeared first on Dance Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why do I dance? I never really asked myself that question. My initial love for dance was visceral and complete; when I started as a teenager, my brain and body had found an activity that could consume my thoughts and… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1183,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions\/1183"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fullrenovations.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
Caleb Teicher<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n